Free and Effective Viral Marketing Tools to Promote Your Business
What got you reading this article? If I have to guess, I will assume you saw the word “viral”? If you ask me again and again the best type of traffic generation method for any business, I will simply say “create a viral promotion”! Nothing really beats a viral campaign.
In this world we live, we depend on other humans to make decisions for us at a very subconscious level. We read other people’s review before we buy a product online, we see a neighbor with a new product and we immediately believe the product is genuine. Our friends buy something and we immediately agree that we should buy it too. You see, it’s a viral word, someone tell you, you tell someone else, and that other person then tells someone else who in turn tells someone else etc.
Now that we know what we’re talking about, it’s about time we delve into it.
Have you ever read an interesting article and at the end you saw “if you think this article has benefited you, please send to a friend that might need it” or something similar to that line? I bet you have. That is the power of viral marketing. So if you are a kind soul, you remember Bob who needs to read this wonderful article. When Bob is done reading, he remembers Kate, and the chain goes on and on.
Marketing note: This was how Facebook started. Mark sent the info of the new site to some dudes on his campus and they in turn passed it on to other people and today, we have close to a billion people on that network. This is viral marketing at its best?
What Can you do right away?
Get social! Add social sharing icons to each page of your website. You see those little social sharing icons near the top of this page? Exactly. Give people a chance to share things with their friends. The best social sharing widget tool I use is called AddThis, and it is 100% FREE! And it has cool analytics too!
With AddThis, I can see exactly which one of my posts get shared. The ones that are popular, I can not focus more energy into promoting this page/product/service. And I can also create more content like this, because now I know which kind of content people enjoy and want to share with their friends.
Using AddThis is easy as setting up adsense ads. When you sign up for AddThis, you get to create the widget with whatever social icon you want displayed like facebook, twitter, etc. Then you simple copy and paste the code to your site wherever you want it to be displayed.
*If you are using wordpress, there’s a bunch of free social sharing plugins, including the free AddThis Plugin.
Get a Blog: C’mon mate, it’s the 21st century! Very few tools in the whole world wide web beats the efficiency of a blog. In fact as a serious business minded person, it should form the basis of your marketing. Like I wrote in the last article, your blog projects your image, your voice, your person. It is about the biggest viral marketing tool you have full control over.
Marketing Note: All the big brands have a blog, why not start yours today? Use a free blog if you must: WordPress or Blogger
What can you do right away?
Okay, so going viral is not that easy. You’d have to create something very interesting like: a product, service, blog post, image, video, or whatever that will get people interested and want to share. But you must also give them a chance to easily share your content, that’s why it’s very important to use social sharing widgets like AddThis.
Use the power of social media: I have written an extensive post on using the power of social media here: http://howtowebmaster.com/become-a-social-media-guru-how-to-legally-steal-fans-and-followers/
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Getting social is such an easy way to promote your business. Thanks!
I guess what is new to me here is the AddThis tool. I have never come across it before. I know the essence of viral marketing and I agree that with social shares this can be facilitated.
However, I use other social tools and they it has been wonderful! I guess I may just use the AddThis tool to run an A/B test to see if it provides better results!
I left this comment in kingged.com where this post was shared for Internet marketers.
Sunday – kingged.com contributor
http://kingged.com/free-tools-viral-marketing/
Great!
This is indeed an intriguing topic.
Every marketers desire to generate thousand traffic to their business, and there’s nothing better to do than to create a viral promotion in order to make this dream possible. So, it is so good to be true to know that there are free and effective viral marketing tools to help you promote your business efficiently.
AddThis is foreign to me, yet I think this tool is useful. Social sharing buttons are just the little click buttons in your blog posts, yet these little buddies are helpful and powerful to give your posts a chance to be shared online. So for that, optimize your social sharing buttons now, try AddThis and see how it really works.
Thanks for the shared knowledge! 🙂
Best,
Ann07
By the way, I found this post shared on Kingged.com
Leon, I agree viral marketing is happening everywhere, quite naturally… I recently submitted my 7th eBook to Amazon Kindle Bookstore and there was a ‘Pin It’ button, waiting to pin the book cover image on Pinterest. Then you do something there, and Pinterest shares it with Twitter. Likewise, after creating a filtered image with the Instagram app, you are offered sharing buttons for facebook, Twitter and another site. It seems to be an automatic process of thinking now, with content creation, then the re-purposing of that content. Even Google Plus has Friend+Me apps connected with action there, to get it out to other social platforms… Thanks for this useful article today.